France's far-right leader to step down
Le Pen says he won't run again for presidency
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PARIS - France turned a page yesterday when Jean-Marie Le Pen, 80, France's far-right leader and a five-time presidential candidate, announced that he would not run again for the presidency.
The retirement of the man who once dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history" marks the end of a career that has influenced mainstream politicians in France for a quarter century and made headlines across Europe.
Le Pen, who reached the final round of the presidential election in 2002, said yesterday that he was ready to step down from the leadership of his National Front party in 2010 or early 2011 and let his successor contest the next presidential poll in 2012. He made no secret of his preference for his daughter Marine, 40, to take over.
"I am a vigorous octogenarian, but I am also a realist," Le Pen said in a telephone interview yesterday. "Election campaigns require the highest degree of physical and mental capacity, so I think it's reasonable to put the next generation in charge."
He added, "Barring exceptional circumstances" - like an unexpected early election before he steps down - "I will not stand again."
Le Pen first made the announcement in an interview with the magazine Valeurs Actuelles that was published yesterday.
In the 27 years since he first ran for president, the National Front leader has been convicted for numerous offenses, including inciting racial hatred and hitting a female candidate during legislative elections in 1997.
But he also honed a nationalistic message, peppered with anti-immigration slogans, calls to abandon the euro and references to sleaze in the governing elite, that resonated with an electorate fearful of globalization and ever more disillusioned with the country's leadership class.
Built up by the mainstream left to undercut the mainstream right in the 1980s, and ultimately brought low by President Nicolas Sarkozy's own brand of nationalism in the election last year, Le Pen has presided over a dramatic rise and fall in his party's fortunes.
He owed his first breakthrough to François Mitterrand, the late Socialist president who replaced the majority voting system that had kept the far right out of Parliament with proportional representation before the 1986 legislative election.
With polls indicating that the Socialists are losing against their Gaullist rivals, Mitterrand was accused of deliberately strengthening the National Front in order to split the vote on the right. The Socialists still lost the election to the Gaullists, who duly changed the electoral law back. But for five years, Le Pen's movement had 35 lawmakers in Parliament, a boost that turned its marginal voice into a fixture of French politics and cemented his voter base at about 10 percent of the electorate.
Le Pen's most spectacular success came in the 2002 presidential elections, when he unexpectedly beat Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate, with 16.8 percent of the vote in the first round, before losing overwhelmingly to President Jacques Chirac in the runoff.
Fears of a repeat of Le Pen's performance resurfaced in the election campaign last year. But Sarkozy, who as interior minister preached zero tolerance on crime and passed several laws restricting immigration, openly courted National Front voters and won over enough of them to drop Le Pen's score back to 10 percent and that of his party to below the 5 percent threshold required to get reimbursed by the state for an election campaign.
As a result, the National Front is 8 million euros, or $11.2 million, in debt and was forced to sell its historic party headquarters in the Paris suburbs - to a Chinese university that plans to open a language school there. According to press reports, Le Pen himself has sold his trademark bullet-proof car on 
